What is a bewildered citizen to make of the sanctions that President Obama levied on Russian officials and the Russian government on Thursday? The confusion starts with the news coverage. The Associated Press, for example, blares that “President Barack Obama has slapped harsh sanctions on the Russian intelligence services.” Meanwhile the former head of the CIA’s Russia operations tells The New York Times, “I think these sanctions are pretty weak. It’s more perhaps symbolic.” Some sloppy reports even suggested, wrongly, that Russian agents had interfered with vote counts or voting machines.

Trying to follow partisan cues won’t help either, as—in what is emerging as a hallmark of the Donald Trump era—the traditional alliances on foreign policy within and between the parties are scrambled and broken. Across party lines, various voices seem unable to decide whether to blame Russia for hacking that intelligence officials say was intended to interfere with the 2016 election, likely to aid Trump, nor on how to react appropriately to that hacking.

The president-elect himself issued a nebulous statement Thursday afternoon, which was evidently a response to Obama’s sanctions, though he did not make any explicit connection. “It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things,” Trump said. “Nevertheless, in the interest of our country and its great people, I will meet with leaders of the intelligence community next week in order to be updated on the facts of this situation.”

Like many Trump statements, this one raises as many questions as it answers. If it’s time to move on, why bother meeting? If it’s important, why has he waited so long? Why has he been declining so many intelligence briefings? Given that Trump has been briefed on the hacks, what might he hear that would induce him to change his mind?

On Friday, Trump tweeted more praise for Putin, apparently lauding him for not immediately retaliating after the sanctions, though his wording was unclear.

In any event, it is an example of the president-elect supporting a foreign autocrat over the U.S. government—an example of the reality that my colleague Uri Friedman identified last week, in which there are effectively dueling American presidents.

The reactions among Trump’s inner circle remain splintered too. Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser, dismissed the sanctions as “largely symbolic,” and said that Russian intelligence did not keep assets in the United States, a judgment that one national-security reporter openly mocked. (She at least may have the excuse of not being briefed, unlike her boss.)

On the other hand, John Bolton, whose name seems to have sunk somewhat in the sweepstakes for a Trump State Department appointment, who was seen just a couple weeks ago complaining that the intelligence was so shaky that the attack could well have been a false-flag operation, now says that Obama should have done much more to “make the Russians feel the pain.”

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative institution that has largely appended itself to the Trump team, produced a short video charging that Obama had invited the hacking by being too lenient with Russia:

Vladimir Putin respects two things: strength and consistency In the last eight years, President Obama has shown neither. pic.twitter.com/dPv9h7NeUO

“It’s time to deal with Russia from a position of strength,” the video concludes. Taking a similar position is Jack Kingston, a former U.S. representative and current Trump adviser, who tweeted, “Putin outplays Obama again. Obama embarrassing himself on the way out the door.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also portrayed Obama’s sanctions as too little and too late. “Sanctions against the Russian intelligence services are a good initial step, however late in coming," he said in a statement. "As the next Congress reviews Russian actions against networks associated with the U.S. election, we must also work to ensure that any attack against the United States is met with an overwhelming response.” (McConnell has been attempting a difficult dance—with one hand, pushing back on demands for a special committee to investigate the hack, while using the other to insist that despite what Trump says, the intelligence community is reliable.)

Most Republican members of Congress seem to be in McConnell’s general vicinity, and worried about the threat of foreign powers interfering with electoral processes. This creates a potential collision between them and the Trump administration early on, despite the best efforts of people like McConnell to build unity. After all, expressing concern over hacking and asking for an inquiry is diametrically opposed to Trump’s view that it probably wasn’t the Russians, and even if it was, it’s time to move on.

Some conservatives have spent the last eight years complaining that Obama has been too accommodating of Russia. But the reactions from Heritage, Bolton, McConnell, and others carry the implication that Trump will take a harder line. To call that expectation unsupported would be an understatement. The president-elect spent the presidential campaign promising friendlier relations with Russia; he suggested he would recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea; he nominated a vocal critic of sanctions on the Kremlin as a secretary of state; and so on.

Then there’s Representative Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, who argues that maybe Russia is responsible, and maybe it’s not—but that if it is, that’s not such a bad thing. “If Russia succeeded in giving the American people information that was accurate, then they merely did what the media should have done,” Franks said on MSNBC Thursday. (He is not the only person to make this case.) It doesn’t take an advanced degree to see the problems with this statement. One can defend the press’s decision to cover the hacked material, and even celebrate the effects of the hacked material, without inviting foreign powers to hack into the emails of political leaders (or those of the nation’s top diplomat, as Trump did during the campaign).

Obama is indeed tardy to the role of hawk in Russo-American relations. But on the left, particularly, the farther left, there’s concern that he is saber-rattling. Glenn Greenwald points out that there’s a long history of American intelligence misleading both the public and elected officials, though Greenwald also believes the hacks should be fully investigated. The skepticism of intelligence sourcing is well-taken, though one question that looms over the debate is precisely what evidence would convince a doubter like Trump of Russian involvement, short of video footage of Putin himself writing malware. There’s growing consensus that evidence points to Russian actors in the hacks, although there is less public proof that they were intended to aid Trump. In any case, there’s no good argument to make against asking for stronger evidence, even if Trump’s allies keep trying to make one.

Not every critique is quite so carefully thought out:

For those who criticize WikiLeaks for not publishing RNC emails or more Putin docs: why don't you just publish them yourselves?

This rather seems to be begging the question; if WikiLeaks did as alleged receive the DNC documents thanks to Russian state actors, then it has a unique source. Any news organization able to get its hands on Putin docs or RNC emails would almost certainly publish them. (Please! Send them here!)

The Nation, which has in recent years tended to view any criticism of Russia—including of its expansionist impulses—as a resurgence of McCarthyism, sees in this case yet another sign that there’s a new Cold War brewing. The dangers of nuclear war, and the malign effects on political discourse within the United States, are no less horrifying than they were 50 years ago. The specter of the U.S. expelling Russian officials as personae non grata on Thursday was straight out of the Cold War playbook of action and reaction, even if some commentators seemed to be unaware of the old spy-game ritual of allowing some suspected spies to stay in the country just so there was someone to throw out in a crisis.

But the rejection of any criticism of Russia has serious shortcomings. Labeling critiques of Putin’s Russia as nothing more than McCarthyism will come as little consolation to Russian dissidents being crushed by Putin. And what if it’s proven that Russia did hack to interfere with the election? Should these fears paralyze the United States and prevent it from responding?

The only person who seems to be enjoying all of this is Putin. If he did in fact direct the hacks in an attempt to help Trump, then it’s a huge win: Trump pulled off the upset, and now he gets a friendly leader in Washington. If he directed the hacks in order to create chaos among American policymakers, then he gets that too. And even if Russia was totally uninvolved, it benefits from all of these dynamics, and will still have a friendly leader in the White House come January 20. The disorder in Washington has given Putin the opportunity to pose as the serene statesman, regarding the scene with equanimity.

Putin announced that he would not expel any American diplomats, despite the public recommendation of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. (This seems possibly choreographed.) He even invited the children of American diplomats to a bash at the Kremlin. It’s a well-executed troll.

Not for some time has Putin had such an opportunity to gloat. He’s also just managed to strike a cease-fire deal in Syria, at least as long as it holds. But Russia remains much diminished from its Cold War peak. Its economy is in shambles, a state of affairs likely to persist even if Trump removes sanctions, especially if the price of oil remains low.

Jeet Heer is not the first to point out (despite what he seems to believe) that the latest dust-up has a pedigree. Russia remains angry about U.S. moves to expand NATO into Eastern Europe in the years after the Soviet Union, and for its support of pro-democracy activists in Russia and other former Soviet republics, which it regards as financing efforts to overthrow governments. But successive U.S. presidents have entered office seeking better relations with the Kremlin. In June of 2001, George W. Bush met with the then-fresh Russian president and infamously declared, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straight-forward and trustworthy—I was able to get a sense of his soul.” But Bush came to infuriate Putin with American support of the “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe in the mid-2000s, and at the very end of Bush’s term, Putin spited him by seizing Georgian territories.

Obama entered office promising better relations than his predecessor. He infamously dispatched then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to present a “reset” button to Lavrov. That effort came to naught, too, with Putin seizing Crimea, intervening on behalf of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and allegedly overseeing hacks to interfere with the election. Trump now says he is the one to shepherd closer relations. One possible takeaway from this sequence is not that the United States and Russia are on the brink of a new Cold War, but rather than the old one never really ended.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”